by Bob Barr | Mar 9, 2020 | Uncategorized |
The Daily CallerInternet search engines have become the encyclopedias of the modern world, gathering and using vast amounts of information on billions of individuals for commercial and other purposes — and updating those databases continuously. With such technology to amass and disperse all manner of data being available, why then is it so difficult to obtain accurate information on just one category of information – crime data? It appears that some, perhaps many, law enforcement agencies may not want accurate and timely information on criminal activity within their jurisdictions available to the public.All of us – including the police — live in the age of the internet. People the world over query search engine behemoth Google constantly. Reliable estimates are that between seven and ten billion Google searches are made every day; trillions each year. Even with that unfathomable amount of information directed to and managed by Google, the company has the capability to disseminate amazingly detailed data on those many users to third parties willing to pay for it. In this, Google is not alone. Other, smaller competitors, along with social media giants like Facebook and YouTube, have developed their own ways of monetizing and reporting information they collect.But when it comes to crime data, we remain in the Dark Ages.Crime statistics are collected and distributed nationally according to a cataloging system developed when Herbert Hoover was our president. The basic tool used by the FBI since 1930 to gather and report statistical data on crimes in the United States is the Uniform Crime Reporting (“UCR”) system. The information made available publicly each year, however, relies on data...
by Bob Barr | Mar 6, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller Editor’s note: We endeavor to bring you the top voices on current events representing a range of perspectives. Below is a column arguing that the possibility of Russian interference in the 2020 election is not a major concern. You can find a counterpoint here, where Charles Kolb argues that Russian interference is a real threat to American democracy.Long before modern Russia meddled in our 2016 presidential election, Winston Churchill – one of the 20th century’s preeminent statesmen – described the difficulty of deciphering Russian policies as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Were Churchill with us today, he would know that the tools available to the Kremlin in this 21st century make that task far more difficult than in 1939 when he made his prescient declaration.Most important in this regard is the reality that agencies within the Russian government, including its still very effective intelligence services, are able to employ social media platforms and internet search engines, to both meddle in the affairs of other countries, including the United States, and to camouflage those efforts from detection.To evaluate what Russia has done, is doing, and will in the future attempt as part of its ongoing drive to interfere in electoral affairs of other countries, it is essential to understand one of the primary principles that drives Russia’s foreign policy – that forces outside its borders seek always to interfere in and weaken the country. Whether such a belief is founded on fact (which sometimes it has been) or fiction, it explains how its leaders – most notably the country’s current strongman, Vladimir Putin –...
by Bob Barr | Mar 4, 2020 | Townhall Article |
Townhall.com For nearly three-quarters of a century, America’s taxpayers have given tens of billions of dollars to an agency of the federal government charged expressly with identifying, controlling and preventing diseases. Yet, despite having faced numerous disease outbreaks in those decades – from malaria in the post-World War II southern states, to SARS, avian flu and Ebola outbreaks in recent years – the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) appears to have been woefully unprepared to respond to the still-developing COVID-19, or “Coronavirus,” that sprang out of mainland China at the end of last year.Predictably, Democrats are almost gleefully pointing to President Trump’s departmental reorganization and funding cuts for the CDC in 2018 as the reason for the agency’s anemic response to COVID-19’s rapid spread. The root cause of the problems at CDC are not of Trump’s making, however, and go far deeper than any recent administrative changes or funding decisions. The CDC for years has suffered from a problem common to government agencies everywhere – “mission creep”; whereby an agency and congressional appropriators deliberately keep expanding its responsibilities in order to justify bigger and bigger budgets. In the case of CDC, this is reflected in the range of non-disease related responsibilities it has championed in recent years; everything from school bullying to workplace accidents and, most notably, gun control.Such institutional expansionism, however, comes at a price; and here it is a loss of focus and priority to what once was the core responsibility of the CDC – control and prevention of diseases.Trump’s three-year long effort to reform federal regulatory and policy functions across the vast horizon of...
